A stadium is a desirable venue for multiple purposes. Such a stadium may be used both for football and baseball activities as well as other social and civic events. This presents a challenge to the operator to convert the field surface to a different style for the particular sport or event and maintain the field quality that is required. This is especially difficult when such a conversion must be completed in a short period of time. For example, the Saturday afternoon baseball game field may need to be converted to a football game field for the Sunday afternoon game. Efforts have been made to develop a conversion system using natural grass trays which are well known in the industry. There are as many as 6,600 of these trays needed to be imported for a full field conversion from an artificial field surface to a natural grass surface. These natural grass trays prove to be very difficult and very costly to use since they are especially made not only to hold the natural grass but also to grow the grass thereon. The trays need appropriate drainage and moisture retention as well as an interlocking mechanism to keep them in place. The cost of maintaining these trays is enormous. They need to be tended to daily and the growing conditions are critical. Therefore, in winter, they need to be trucked south to grow and be maintained, or to be heated in winter use in northern climates. Such natural grass trays, for example, are described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,595,021, Jan. 21, 1997, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,187,894, Feb. 23, 1993, both to Ripley, Sr. et al. Ripley, Sr. et al describes natural turf units for stadia and other activity surfaces, which are transportable between first and second locations, the first location being a location for the performance of the desired activity, and the second location being for the growth and maintenance of the turf units.
Synthetic grass turf assemblies have been used instead, to provide game playing surfaces. The advantages of synthetic grass turf are well known. However, the existing infilled synthetic grass turf assemblies are generally for permanent installation in stadia, are not transportable and not adapted for conversion either entirely or in part.
Therefore, there is a need for a method of using infilled synthetic grass turf assemblies to provide convertible and transportable game playing surfaces.